Kent Bush: Remember when CDs weren’t obsolete?

Everyone in my generation remembers The Buggles “Video Killed the Radio Star.” The song was the first video played on MTV back when the M in MTV stood for music.

They played videos. There was no Youtube. If you wanted to see music videos, you watched MTV.

But life changes and now MTV is home to shows celebrating teen pregnancy, amateur stuntmen and people laughing at video clips from the internet.

Another of the big changes in life is coming soon. Best Buy just announced that they will stop carrying compact discs this summer. Target will follow suit soon. They have already begun selling CDs on consignment rather than putting them in inventory.

Spotify, Youtube, Amazon Music and Apple’s iTunes have made streaming and digital music ubiquitous. Many have no way to play a CD in their homes and cars. They have phones, iPods and other devices that connect to apps and internet sites that have access to more music than MTV ever did.

Video may have killed the radio star, but digital music killed the CD — and it is just the most recent casualty in the entertainment industry.

Vinyl was once king. It still is among hipsters who keep and play the black music discs as a throwback to a simpler time. The best thing about vinyl was that the records came in different sizes and you had to play single songs and albums at different speeds for them to work properly. McDonald’s even gave single songs as prizes in happy meals.

But vinyl was anything but portable. You were lucky if the needle didn’t skip when your brother walked by. You certainly couldn’t play one in the car.

Enter the 8-track tape. Those big tapes were amazing. The best was when songs were too long to stay on one track and actually paused while the tape clicked across tracks.

Then came the cassette tape and we were finally able to not only listen to music, but record our own. How many evenings were spend with a cassette tape on “pause” while you waited for your favorite song to come on so you could record it off of a radio broadcast? That’s when mixtapes became part of the culture. Kids these days and their Spotify and iPod playlists don’t appreciate how difficult making a good mixtape used to be.

Thanks to cassette tapes, we got the Walkman. The early predecessor of the iPod was pretty good with cassette tapes. But when the medium changed to CDs the portability wasn’t good at first. The skips and bumps with early portable CD technology were so bad, I am a little surprised the CD made it out of those early days.

But laser technology improved and we got better portable music with CDs.

Of course today’s technology, portability, flexibility and affordability have all taken huge strides over vinyl, 8-track, cassette and compact disc media. That’s why Best Buy is ready to move on and move away from physical media for music. One day all hip teenagers will rediscover CDs and they will be sold as vintage products and Best Buy will bring them back.

I really miss my cassette suitcases full of cheap cassette tapes and my huge cabinets full of CDs. One day, maybe I’ll get a vintage player that can let me enjoy them in their natural habitat again.

Until then, I will enjoy music digitally until technology advances again and holograms play all of my music for me.

— Kent Bush is publisher of Shawnee (Oklahoma) News-Star and can be reached at kent.bush@news-star.com.

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